NASA plans a moon base, but doesn't plan on getting any new help from the …

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As covered in a number of places, NASA has announced a rough outline of its plans to return to the moon. NASA had made its intention of establishing a moon base clear in the past, but this is the first time specific information about how they intend to go about it has been released for public consumption.

Manned missions are intended to start in 2020, centered around delivering the basic equipment for a permanent base. As more is put in place, missions will gradually increase in length, until extended stays and permanent occupancy become possible by 2024. The base will be solar powered, which requires placing it at one of the moon's poles, where sufficient exposure could be obtained 70-90 percent of the time. Plans include possible utilization of local resources, including the now unlikely discovery of accessible water on the nearby dark side of the moon.

Getting all of this off the ground requires a lot of things to go right over the next 15 years, not the least of which is the development of the Constellation collection of launch and travel vehicles. These modernized versions of the Apollo launch vehicles are the ones that are expected to get us to the moon, and they haven't left the drawing board yet. NASA intends to get that ball rolling without any significant budget increases: savings derived from the end of the shuttle program and a reduced commitment to building the International Space Station will be redirected towards the lunar program.

The New York Times notes that this is intended in part as a testbed for developing the technology that will get us to Mars. Some are voicing fears, however, that the problems solved by establishing a presence on the moon might be very different from what's needed to get to Mars. There's also the danger that maintaining a presence on the moon could become an end unto itself that sucks resources from Mars.

They also report that the base will have an open architecture that would allow commercial and international modules to be plugged in to the growing infrastructure. This is somewhat ironic, given that they've also just published an analysis of the status of the space station, which was once intended to be a platform for international cooperation and commercial exploration. Instead, it seems to be limping along, as the end of the shuttle program and NASA's increased focus on exploration beyond the immediate neighborhood of the earth leave it little more than a distraction.

My own analysis is this: industry hasn't found anything that's worth doing in low-earth orbit so far, and they're extremely unlikely to suddenly discover something that's going to make it worth the added costs of doing it on the moon. That leaves us with science and technology development as justifications. Given what it might tell us about the evolution of life and planets outside the earth, there are compelling reasons to want to go to Mars, provided we plan on staying long enough to answer these questions. I haven't seen an equivalent scientific justification for putting people on the moon; if one exists, NASA should be broadcasting it.

That just leaves us with technology development, and the group that's saying the moon won't help us get to Mars seem to have a good argument. Most of the time involved in the Mars mission will be spent in transit; conditions on a moon base won't approximate that. The chemistry of the surface of Mars, as well as its possession of an atmosphere, also make the moon base a bad model for the remainder of the trip. It seems to me that developing the capacity to get into low-earth orbit cheaply, and putting a real infrastructure in place there would be far more helpful in terms of getting us to Mars.